Tower of Power - So Very Hard to Go
Should old acquaintance be forgot, here's a concert turning 50 to blow your whole dang mind.
Ah yes, Oakland. The other city by the Bay. It gets a bad rap now, but it was once a cultural and sports mecca, you know.
Now all the teams are gone and half the stores are boarded up, but 50 years ago it was emerging from the shadow of San Francisco as its own thang.
Thanks to the American state religion of Predatory Corporate Feudal Subsidy Capitalism, the Athletics are gone to 115 degree Sacramento and the Raiders to the casino climes of Vegas.
But let's not lament the circuses the Mommy's Money Men left us with as they absconded with the scones, this is a party atmosphere y'all. Speaking of which, I can think of one thing that's still from Oakland that would make any city proud and primed to party.
These cats have been around since sliced bread first appeared, and they still play. How many among us can say such a thing? I'm like Leonard Cohen, I ache in the places where I used to play.
When you get to be my age, all concerts look and sound like this picture, unless you have your in-ear assisted listening device and your trusty, geriatric discount bifocals all in place.
And this is all before the drugz take effect.
Ah, there, that's better. I can almost see the horn section now.
And what could be more justifiably legendary than the horn section of the mighty Tower of Power?
Let's ring in the new at the dawn of winter like they did exactly five decades ago, in the storied SF venue called Winterland. I'm afraid I must insist!
Tower of Power
Winterland
San Francisco, California USA
12.31.1974
01 countdown & Auld Lang Syne
02 Oakland Stroke/Walkin' Up Hip Street
03 It's Not the Crime
04 This Time It's Real
05 Only So Much Oil In the Ground
06 Willing to Learn
07 Don't Change Horses (In the Middle of a Stream)
08 Give Me the Proof
09 So Very Hard to Go
10 I Believe In Myself
11 What Is Hip?
12 Knock Yourself Out
13 You're Still a Young Man
14 (To Say the Least) You're the Most
15 Down to the Nightclub
Total time: 1:17:18
Lenny Williams - vocals
Francis "Rocco" Prestia - bass
Bruce Conte - guitar & vocals
Chester Thompson - keyboards
David Bartlett - drums
Emilio Castillo - tenor saxophone & vocals
Stephen "Doc" Kupka - baritone saxophone & vocals
Lenny Pickett - flute, clarinet, saxophones & vocals
Greg Adams - trumpet & flugelhorn
Mic Gillette - trumpet, trombone & vocals
320/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault
spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this essentially equivalent to a preFM source
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, retracked, repaired & remastered by EN, Decemeber 2024
506 MB FLAC/direct link
506 MB FLAC/direct link
That's it from me for December and 2024, and I hope you all dug it as much as I dug doing it for you. I've already got a couple of devastating items in store for January, including my first ever foray into the AI stem separation tech that's gonna revolutionize this ROIO stuff, just like I've been saying for eons. It's never easy, but try to take it as a positive Syne, and let's all spread best wishes for a fantastic 2025!--J.
Always had a soft spot for these guys, fabulous horns. Thanks and best wishes from the UK.
ReplyDeleteI'll try and keep an eye on this, as I have some dire murky bootlegs that AI might improve. As a side note...can it turn 1920s 78s into stereo, or at least clean 'em up? DRaftervoi....from over at Voodoo Wagon.
ReplyDeleteoooh hey you, love your page
DeleteThe truth is, it's evolving faster than the damn Giger Alien chasing Sigourney Weaver around the Nostromo, and it can be just as terrifying in a way. That guy "rdwm" that's on the Genesis Movement and DIME, he does mostly Prog stuff? He hipped me yesterday that there's iterations of it now where it can untangle something into 7 and not just 4 stems. That's called Steinberg SpectraLayers but it looks very ProTools, very super intricate and maybe beyond my admittedly low pay grade of it all GUI wise.
That said, the 4 stem separation plugin for Audacity (called openVINO) is adequate for the minimal alterations I am making to this BEAT show from dude's IEM's, where the other geetar player is 2/3 as loud as he and his voice semi-dominates the waveform, yet is still somehow often buried in the mix.
In this case, I'm not really demuxing it back together from the constituent parts it's giving me, so much as using those rendered tracks of iso guitar and vocal as overdub tracks -- altered in volume & EQ to avoid phase cancellation -- to sweeten the mix into what the average person might take for an FM broadcast of the concert, you know?
In something like this that has two intertwined guitars and a Chapman Stick, well let's just say we're years, if not decades, away from software realistically unraveling those, or horn sections or what have you. I was only able to isolate and adequately amplify the other guitar because in the original IEM/AUD matrix of it I worked on, the AUD taper person was on Steve Vai's side of the hall and the guitars were panned pretty hard left and right in the final MTX thing.
As per your question re: 78s restoring to stereo etc, the answer is yes and no, but will become more yes as it progresses from what equates to today's Netscape 2.0 of it, but tomorrow will be rendered quaint and primitive by what is to come.
DeleteIf it's just simple things that have just say, piano or guitar, vocal, bass and drums then yeah, you could likely make whole edifice mixes using multitracked rendered stems and who knows what for those, and position 'em around the stereo field you'd create from scratch. For the BEAT thing I took stems it gave me and worked them up in Sound Forge to slot back in into favorable, non-stereo-field-destroying spots in the L-R spectrum and whatnot. This took several passes to not suck, trust me.... and I still have yet to finish the 2nd set lolol
Of course, the central caveat about it all that will take time to siphon out as the software evolves is the artifacts and the weird noises it sometimes renders, which with the thing I've been doing is thankfully at a minimum but from what I have been told can be a real dealbreaker thusfar. It all boils down to time and the quantum leaps it will all take from this nascent state down the road.
DeleteHi, Josh, I replied by email but as others may wonder about the software, want to add a bit here. I just tried a 30 second free trial on a program and pulled out the vocals from a terrible Petty bootleg ("Heartbreak In New York"). I was able to pull them out as a separate track from the muffled mess of a mix...with some artefacts...and could possibly tweak the vocals a bit and put 'em back in.
DeleteThat is amazing but wouldn't solves the mushy problem. I had better lucky running a filter curve in Audacity, which brighten up the middle frequencies a bit.
I did try a mono 1920s recording, with worse results. It recognizes about 1/3 of the vocal and pulled it out but left the rest with the instruments.
Now...this is just a first pass with 30 second samples; Rome wasn't built in a day. I will try a few more programs and see what I can learn.
The online iterations of it generally suck horrifically man. Get the Audacity plugin at least, you know? It has its moments and it's better than any of the goofy free trial, online based things.
Deletehttps://www.audacityteam.org/download/openvino/
Also what email did you use? I didn't get any email from you, but try emperornobody@yahoo.com
DeleteI'll give it a shot and try it. I already use Audacity when I digitize radio shows. Most are fine and don't need any adjustment but I want to keep up with the technology. I thank you for your information! (Also, I resent the email....)
ReplyDelete